A rising tide lifts all boats

I’ve periodically mentioned here a visit I made many years ago to the Tenement Museum in New York. Every time I mention it, I make the same point: the museum demonstrates America’s social mobility because census records show that the tenement’s descendents all moved upwards economically. Grandpa Guiseppe or Grandma Sadie might have had a miserable experience, but their grandchildren and great grandchildren were prosperous, mainstream Americans.

Here’s a video that says this is no surprise, as America is characterized by income mobility — stick around in this country long enough, and stay away from the welfare trap, and you too can make money or, at least, your descendents can:

If you go to the YouTube page for the video, you’ll see a bunch of garbled comments saying that the video is a lie. As you all know, aside from common sense financial observations (i.e., if you spend less money, you’ll have more money in pocket, whether you’re an individual or a government), convoluted economic theories tend to muddle me. This video offers a very straightforward theory and, in keeping with my reverence for Occam’s Razor, I’m inclined to believe it. Do you support the video or do you see errors?

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It drives me wild when people who know better modify “data” as if it were a singular noun. That aside… . From an explanation of the data standpoint, he’s absolutely right. It is a common mistake to look at two (or more) sets of numbers and compare them in the wrong context, so to speak: Between subjects vs. within subjects. He’s (correctly) arguing that the proper way to look at these data is within subjects. He’s asking what happened to the 1975 poor people over time. And the answer is they got richer (became less poor). Duh, me too!

I do have some other quibbles but understand that this is just a three minute video. He doesn’t say where he’s getting these data (he did once but not always). Were the incomes adjusted for inflation? In the table that shows the difference– $ increase in income– there are five lines. He’s looking at the top and bottom, identified as “rich” and “poor.” There’s some interesting stuff going on in the other three lines, too, that would help him make his case even more. And it would have been helpful to know just what incomes are “rich” “poor” and so on.

Charles Martel

I remember my astonishment when I read somewhere (I promise to go track down the source) that 100 years ago it took an average of 10 years for immigrant families in New York to move from the squalor of the Lower East Side to decent middle-class housing in the Bronx. Ten years. Of course, that meant everybody pitching in, working long hours and saving like mad. Yet they knew the goal was obtainable—there would be no Cossacks at the door demanding tribute or blood.

Put it in a larger context: Millions of people poured in from the crapholes of Europe where they had been forced into submission and immobility for generations. Only the rarest—and luckiest—individuals could escape their station in life there. So, they took the biggest gamble of their lives and came to America, and within less than a generation many of them were on the road to undreamt of success.

The slobs at the OWS rallies can’t be bothered by history. But even they, as stupified as they are by their entertainment devices, cheap sex and Marxist perfessers, might be astounded at the history of social mobility in this country.

It is precisely because people are rising above their stations that these people will work to stop it. That is what they are doing after all. That is their aim, their intention, and their ultimate consequence.

jj

Of course a hundred years ago, they also put in part of that decade in the tenements learning English, too. Oddly enough, it may have helped.

Mike Devx

The numbers in the video aren’t adding up.

The statistics in the first 30 seconds or so indicate that for income (defined as salaries:

But later, at the 2:15 mark, we have a chart of the 20% quintiles for income (also defined as Salaries) where, if you assume the numbers reported are means (not medians), and for the years 1975 and 1991:

And the percentages aren’t even close to matching.
Also, in the chart, the 3rd quintile, for 1991, is doing WORSE than the 4th and 5th, which simply isn’t possible.
So the data presented is fatally flawed. Either the 3rd quintile is wrong, or the 4th and 5th quintiles are wrong.

When comparing quintiles, calculations based on median aren’t very good; you’d want to use mean. But the percentages reported at the very beginning, and the percentages according to this chart, simply don’t come close to matching up, and they can’t both be right. If they’re somehow correct numbers, then their definitions of “salaries” are completely different. Apples and oranges?

Finally, the comparison is only based on “salaries” as income. What a household spends is based on quite a bit more than salaries. Is that gross or net? Taxation taken into account? Welfare and various other entitlements?

Still, we know that most income mobility is driven by intelligence, which is mostly not inherited genetically,and other studies have proven that within a family, if there is a rapid rise from poor or middle to rich, within two or three generations, all that wealth has been squandered by the children or grandchildren. So the point about income mobility is true.

suek

>>other studies have proven that within a family, if there is a rapid rise from poor or middle to rich, within two or three generations, all that wealth has been squandered by the children or grandchildren>>

Funny you should say that. My mother has been dead now for some 30 years – but in her day, the phenomenon had already been noted…

“Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations” – shortened to “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves” was the expression to express a family’s progression and recession.

Mike Devx

yes. it’s not *always* true. but it is so often true.

And, I shouldn’t have said that “intelligence” isn’t inherited. That was too facile a statement. Maybe I could have said “business intelligence”. Whatever the qualities that the businessman or woman had that caused incredible success, those qualities are not inheritable.

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